‘Red Band Society’: Too much sentiment could be fatal

September 18, 2014 4:05 AM

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This new young-adult Fox series is certainly going to divide audiences. For one thing, it tends to romanticize being young and sick. “Red Band Society” is set in a light-filled pediatric hospital ward whose large poster-filled rooms look like dorm caves, where half a dozen teens with serious illnesses flirt, party, and sneak off campus. (Cough, medical marijuana, cough.) And no one, including Octavia Spencer’s fierce boss Nurse Jackson and Dave Annable’s McDreamy Dr. McAndrew, really minds because, well, the kids aren’t all right healthwise.

One boy, Charlie (Griffin Gluck), is in a coma, but his thinking is perky and funny as he provides the voiceover narration. “This is me talking to you from a coma,” he says at the start of the premiere Wednesday night at 9. “Deal with it.” Comas, it seems, might be kind of a cool space.